Why have UT3/Q4 "failed"? What is Reflex going to do better?

This is probably a question you have been thinking about for a long time and might have to answer quite often, especially when trying to raise funds for the project.

Why have UT3/Q4 never managed to continue the huge success of UT2k4/Q3. Those two games were without a doubt the flagship games of esports (along with CS and Starcraft). Their successors were made in fancy new engines introducing next gen graphics, with the potential to attract of alot of new players. But they soon suffered empty servers, and no big company bothered to make another fps ever since, not counting TF2. So what the hell happened with those games and the entire genre? And what lessons have we learned from those games? How will reflex avoid the same fate?

Quake 4 wasn't exactly the best launch. From memory, there were performance issues, network issues, mediocre maps and no attempt to maintain the competitive features the core audience had been used to in mods like OSP and CPMA.

There was also a lot of minor things that I think hurt it. It had very noisy textures, was too dark and had small players, making it hard to see what was going on. The weapons took up too much of the screen. Loading times were a bit high.

I might be wrong, since I only played for a couple of months when it first came out and that was quite a while ago. But I remember it feeling like a mod group had just butchered the Quake3 and Doom3 code together and called it done.

By the time Q4Max and custom maps came along, a lot of damage had already been done. It takes a really big, really desirable game to survive a botched release.

UT3.. I really can't remember much about it. I played for a while, but I've always preferred the Quake series, so it was just casual play. The engine does have poor feeling input though, which always bugs me.

After that, the arena shooter was abandoned by AAA studios. I'm sure they were aware they could put out a competent one and see modest sales, but they're not interested in modest sales. They're interested in 7-digit sales, using burning $100 notes to light fireplaces full of more $100 notes, establishing a new IP that can be milked dry. That's simply the way things work when you're gambling the kinds of money AAA titles take to develop.

So yeah, they'd sell, but there were always options that would sell more.

So what have we learned?

For a start, we're not going to ship the game half finished or ignore crucial systems like input and netcode. Our input was "good enough" for most games months ago, but we've ripped it out and put in something that feels better than any other game I've played.

We're not going to rely on a modding team to implement features for us. The moment we go from "Beta" to "Release", we're already going to have the core competitive features that our players expect (and have for a decade). Some of those features still haven't made it in to QuakeLive, which has been actively developed (using mods as a roadmap) for years.

We're not going to get greedy and obsessed with sales figures. We don't need sales projections in the millions in order to even consider a game -- and the scene doesn't need it either. A strong, supportive community is far more valuable than a weak, dissatisfied but huge community.

My belief is that Reflex can avoid the same fate by actually caring about making a good game.

My guess is that since UT2k4/Q3 already had extensive competitive modding in place in order to facilitate tournament play, there was no clear incentive to redo it all for UT3/Q4 since the games were almost identical.

Reflex has to have the required competitive tools in place as well as a functional matchmaking system, so finding people to play against is easy.

Past that the game just has to be good enough so that enough people want to play it, then maybe a few tournaments and enough publicity to get the ball rolling.

I think the functional matchmaking is a really important part that has been missing ~10 years ago. As a new player you'd just go on a random server and just get demolished by veteran players. But games like LoL, Starcraft, FIFA etc have set a new standard in modern online multiplayer. Which means that now you can actually have a high skill ceiling and complex mechanics. At the core it's still just pick up guns and shoot at opponents. You don't need to learn much more at first. And as long as you get matched against players of your skill level, it doesn't matter how bad you are. (Though it is always a good thing to give the players the feeling of progression)

Also I think the game has to offer something new (features or style) to attract new players. Part of the reason why QL wasn't a big thing was that it only appealed to it's former (Q3) players. It didn't really stand out enough to get more attention.

UT3 : Terrible release. Worse than BF4's for reference. The game came out in an alpha state almost - missing simple core functions such as demoing, adding favourite servers on the browser. The early menu system was incomplete and felt completely tailored for console users. There wasn't much of a map pool released with the game either so it was left up to the scene to do most of the work, which is okay considering UTs healthy history of modding but not really handy for a launch scene.The game also required a high end PC back then - for a lot of my friends and I it wasn't just a £40 game any more but a complete system over haul. Ati 9800 wasn't going to cut it any more!

In game itself wasn't too bad: the movement was pretty good, the mechanics weren't bad and the flow was fast paced.

Worth mentioning that UT3 went for a semi-realistic graphics approach (with a lot of blending textures and dark lighting), which did not provide the clean visibility that twitch shooting demands. And, like Quake 4, it was a sequel to a game that had set the bar very, very high.

I played a bit of UT2k4 around the time that UT3 came out and the major turnoff for me was the insanely nerfed movement system. I don't recall the specifics but I think they had removed dodge - jumping entirely and just left dodges in place. The game ended up just feeling a lot slower overall and that was generally uninteresting. I don't know if they managed to correct that - didn't stick around long enough.

It was basically nerfed back to how it was in UT99 (a game which everyone claims is the best in the series) yet for some reason this time around it was "slow and clunky" but in UT99 it was apparently fine.

I agree with you though, the movement in 2k4 was the best in the series. That being said, slightly nerfed movement isnt enough to make an entire game "bad" for me and while I prefer 2k4 movement, I still enjoy playing UT3 from time to time.

It may have slower movement, but its got hoverboards and they were fun as shit.

I always felt that UT had slowly shifted away from the small arenas towards large outdoor areas with vehicles and new game modes, trying to bridge between arena fps and battlefield/cod, but not being particularly great in either aspect.

For Q4 however, I have no idea why it never really got much hype at all, despite the huge success Q3 had.

The 2k4 Onslaught maps were highly representative of this. I think that's a lot of the direction they took when they went into UT3, but the reality is that for my friends and I, we were more Team Arena players and Onslaught didn't really appeal to us.

I don't know much about Q4 - but did it have the same type of strafe jumping or air acceleration that made Q3 so popular for so long? I've only seen a few clips and while the movement isn't as exaggerated as CPMA, it was hard to tell if there was much acceleration...

Q4 was fairly similar to Q3 movement with some additions. A little slower acceleration from strafe jumps I think but there were unique mechanics like crouch sliding that helps you maintain speed around corners. Hard to explain and there's not many Q4 videos that show it off well either. Here's one I like.

For Q4 it was essentially a copy cat game (only crouch slide was interesting change gameplay wise) that failed to match or exceed previous games in features. Ideally you should both innovate in gameplay and match or exceed in features. Doing one can be enough to succeed but doing neither is a sure failure.